The director of data center engineering at Apple has joined generative AI giant OpenAI.

Spas Lazarov spent the last ten years and ten months at Apple, with the company disclosing eight operational data centers across North America, Europe, and Asia in its latest environmental report.

Prior to his time at Apple, Lazarov spent nearly 26 years at GE, including as a director of critical power systems engineering. Lazarov is also part of the global advisory council at the Infrastructure Masons, an industry group.

"I'm thrilled to share that I’ve joined OpenAI as a member of technical staff, where I’ll be designing and building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure, pushing the boundaries of power, cooling, and compute to support the next generation of AI models and enable research at an unprecedented scale," Lazarov said in a LinkedIn post.

Lazarov joins a rapidly growing team at OpenAI as the company expands its Stargate data center joint venture, alongside significant cloud deals - including a $30bn-a-year one with Oracle.

Last year, Keith Heyde joined from Meta as director of physical infrastructure (we chatted to him about Stargate in the latest magazine). He was joined by fellow Meta exec Chris Malone in March, who became the company's head of data centers.

Also starting in March was Melissa Du, a founding team member of AI cloud company Voltage Park.